Tuesday, April 24, 2012

There are some important projects that need to be up and running starting like
yesterday, because they are key to human survival. Unfortunately,
they cannot be funded in the usual ways because of the warped nature
of market economics and global finance, which dictates that the only
goal of investing money is to make more money. The project of
averting disastrous outcomes is not a money-maker, per se, and does
not get funded. But shipping in millions of plastic orange Halloween
pumpkins from China every year is a sure bet, and so the free market
prioritizes orange plastic pumpkins above doing what is essential to
keep us all alive. The invisible hand of the free market, it turns
out, is attached to an invisible idiot.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Previously I have raised the
question of why it is that, given compelling evidence that action is
needed, we fail to act. Are we smarter than yeast? Perhaps not. But
perhaps the problem is not with our inability to act but, more
importantly, with our inability to think. We pay lip service to the
power of reason, but by and large we choose to inhabit a fictional
realm where we use abstract symbols to point at invisible objects,
which we assign to one in the same realm of consciousness. Could it
be that each of us inhabits, at the very least, a separate realm of
consciousness, and, more radically, many different realms, in effect
dreaming several different dreams, never fully waking up from any of
them?

Sigmund Freud conveyed the strange
logic of dreams with the following joke:

I never borrowed a kettle from you

I returned it to you unbroken

It was already broken when I
borrowed it from you.

This “enumeration of inconsistent
arguments,” writes Slavoj Žižek in his Violence,
“confirms by negation what it endeavors to deny—that I returned
your kettle broken.”

Here is an entirely commonplace example: the canonic list of excuses made by a child who neglected to do her homework:

1. I lost it
2. My dog ate it
3. I didn't know it was assigned

A similar triad of counterfactuals seems to
recur in many long-running, seemingly insoluble political conflicts.
Each counterfactual inhabits a fictional realm of its own (it can be
true only in its own parallel universe). The effect of the three disjoint statements taken together is to form a cognitive wedge, which
blocks all further rational thought.

Here, for example, is how Žižek casts
the way radical Islamists respond to the Holocaust:

On the other side of the great
Arab-Israeli divide, we have a similar triad

There is no God (Israelis are by
and large atheists)

We are God's chosen people; God
gave Palestine to us

Palestine is ours simply because
centuries ago we used to lived there

Please note that I am not bringing this
matter up to weigh in on the conflict, but to point out what makes it
insoluble: both sides are dreaming not one but several contradictory
dreams. No reconciliation is possible unless they awaken, but if they
do they will have to abandon their strategic dream-positions and lose
any standing they may have had to engage in negotiation. Some day
they will awaken, not having noticed when the movie had ended, and
their world will be gone.

Closer to home, last year, we were
treated to the wonderful spectacle of Occupy Wall Street, with its
incoherent “demands” and a lively cacophony of voices. The
occupiers demonstrated quite forcefully that they exist, and that
they stand apart. It was not a political revolt, but an ontological
one: “we are not you.” Thus, making specific demands would have
been superfluous. The occupiers could have achieved the same (perhaps
even a greater) effect by chanting something rhythmic yet free of
meaning:

Blah! Blah! Blah-blah-blah!

Blah! Blah! Blah-blah-blah!

In response, the political chattering
classes spewed forth the following triad:

The Occupiers lack specific
demands

The Occupiers' demands are
unreasonable

Meeting the Occupiers' demands
would not solve the problem

They were asleep, you see, and dreaming
of an occupation. Some day they will awaken, not having noticed when
the movie had ended, and their world will be gone.

Monday, April 16, 2012

[Update: He won. First ever non-stop single-handed circumnavigation of the Americas. 27,077 nautical miles in 309 days, 18 hours and 38 minutes.]

In case you didn't know... Matt Rutherford is about to complete a first ever solo non-stop circumnavigation of the Americas aboard a donated 27-foot Albin-Vega. It took him about a year to get up north, navigate the Northern Passage, sail down the Pacific coast, across Cape Horn, and back up the Atlantic coast. His arrival back in Annapolis is scheduled for April 21st.